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It Takes a Ruling-Class Village to Staff the White House
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_the_white_house_20160828/
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Posted on Aug 28, 2016
By Paul Street
Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, is greeted by former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a panel discussion titled Equality
for Girls and Women: 2034 Instead of 2134? The event was held by the
Clinton Global Initiative in New York in September of 2014. (Mark Lennihan /
AP)
A recurrent theme in major speeches given last month at the 2016 Democratic
National Convention in Philadelphia held that Democrats like Barack Obama
and Hillary Clinton look to we the people instead of rich, powerful and
purportedly great individuals like Donald Trump to guide the United States.
Repeating a prominent refrain in Obamas 2008 campaign, top Democrats said
the operative words for Americans arent I and me but rather we and
us, as in si se puede (yes we can)a chant repeated during Tim Kaines
and Obamas speeches. Heres how Hillary Clinton worked this leitmotif in
Philadelphia(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/us/politics/hillary-clinton-d
nc-transcript.html?_r=0) :
Dont let anyone tell you that our country is weak. Were not. Dont let
anyone tell you we dont have what it takes. We do. And most of all, dont
believe anyone who says: I alone can fix it. Those were actually Donald
Trumps words [at the Republican convention] in Cleveland. And they should
set off alarm bells for all of us. Really? I alone can fix it? Isnt he
forgetting?
Hes forgetting every last one of us. Americans dont say: I
alone can fix it. We say: Well fix it together. Remember: Our Founders
fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a
nation where one person had all the power. Americans [will Stand Together
to build] a country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at
the top. Where you can get a good job and send your kids to a good school,
no matter what ZIP code you live in. A country where all our children can
dream, and those dreams are within reach.
The Revolving Door
That was all very stirring, but who actually comprises the we that makes
executive branch policy in the name of the common good when either Democrats
or Republicans hold the White House? Not the nations working- and
middle-class majority, thats for sure. The Dutch political scientists
Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Nana de Graaff recently constructed a richly
detailed career profile of the U.S. presidencys top grand strategy
makers(https://www.amazon.com/American-Grand-Strategy-Corporate-Networks/dp
/0415844983) (GSMs)holders of key policymaking cabinet and senior advisory
positionsover the administrations of the 42nd, 43rd and 44th presidents:
Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Barack Obama
(2009-2017). Their findings are like something out of Karl Marxs and
Frederick Engels notion of the executive of the modern state as nothing
but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
By van Apeldoorn and de Graaffs calculations, 23 (more than 70 percent) of
Obamas top 30 GSMs had top-level corporate affiliationsexecutive,
director, senior adviser or partner in a law firmprior to their appointment
to the U.S. executive branch. These 23 were linked through a combination of
board memberships, executive positions and advisory roles to 111
corporations. These affiliations in many cases display a revolving door
pattern, indicating that the actors are not just closely tied to but
actually themselves members of the corporate elite.
Elite travelers in and out of top positions in the Obama White House include
Timothy Geithner, Jack Lew, Peter Orszag, Ken Salazar and Tom Donilon.
Geithner went from being Citigroup Chair Robert Rubins handpicked head of
the New York Federal Reserve Board to serving (Wall Street) as Obamas first
Treasury secretary to his current position as
CEO(http://www.warburgpincus.com/people/timothy-f-geithner/) of the leading
Wall Street private equity firm, Warburg Pincus.
Before replacing Geithner atop Treasury, Lew was chief operating officer at
Citigroups alternative investment division, focused on risky and complex
proprietary trading schemes.
Orszag left his position as Obamas Office of Budget Management director to
become vice chair of global banking and chair of financial strategy and
solutions at Citigroup and now
serves(https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterorszag) as vice chairman of
investment banking and managing director at Lazard. (Salazar and Donilon
will be discussed later in this report.)
Perhaps, Robert Reich writes(http://robertreich.org/SavingCapitalism) ,
it was not entirely coincidental that the Obama administration never put
tough conditions on banks receiving bailout money, never prosecuted a single
top Wall Street executive for the excesses that led to the financial
meltdown and even refused to support a small tax on financial transactions
that would have generated tens of billions of dollars in annual revenues and
discouraged program trading.
The ultimate ruling-class, revolving-door role model is Rubin himself,
mentor to both Geithner and Orszag. Before his positions at Citigroup and
his continuing place co-chairing
(http://monthlyreview.org/product/wall_streets_think_tank/) Wall Streets
Think Tankthe Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)Rubin chaired Goldman
Sachs and then became Bill Clintons top economic adviser and Treasury
secretary, serving as the chief architect of the financial deregulation that
helped set the stage for the epic financial crisis of 2007-2009. Citigroup
was the leading immediate beneficiary of that deregulation and would be the
financial institution that exposed the federal government to the greatest
potential loss during the great state-capitalist bailouts that followed the
epic financial implosion that Citi and other top banks caused.
This oligarchic composition of top White House personnel is hardly unique to
the age of Obama. Twenty-one (70 percent) of Bush IIs GSMs (linked to 87
corporations) and 18 (60 percent) of Clintons GSMs (linked to 48
corporations) held such elite corporate stations.
The numbers get worse when you include GSMs who took such positions after
they served in those presidencies. Broadened that way, the numbers for
Clinton are 25 of 30 (83 percent) linked to 197 corporations and 27 of 30
(90 percent) linked to 157 companies for George W. Bush. By last year, seven
former Obama GSMs had rotated back into top corporate roles after their
White House stints.
The leading faction of capital represented in these GSM positions across the
last three two-term presidencies is the financial sector and is
overwhelmingly linked to transnationally oriented capital. Van Apeldoorn
and de Graaff find that the overall composition of the corporate background
of these grand strategy makers is broad in terms of sectors, with U.S.
transnationally oriented capital in the lead and the financial sector
predominat[ing] among the corporate links of all three administrations.
Finances prevailing role indicates the global orientation of the Fortune
500 interests that hold sway in the U.S. presidency, as financial capital
is by definition more transnationally mobile than productive capital. The
legal and consultancy firms (e.g., Kissinger Associates) that have together
provided more than a fifth of all GSMs since 1993 principally represent
multinational corporations and investment firms.
Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that the last three presidential
administrations have overseen a significant loss of jobs and opportunity for
the working-class majority in an ever more globalized New Gilded Age wherein
the top 0.1 percent owns
roughly(http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/26/berni
e-s/dnc-bernie-sanders-repeats-claim-top-one-tenth-1-o/) as much wealth as
the bottom 90 percentan age of neoliberal austerity for the many, and vast
governmental subsidy, protection and bailout for the wealthy few.
The Policy Planning Group Filter
The revolving door between top corporate/financial and government positions
and the promise of heightened remuneration in the private sector (after
one does Big Business bidding while serving in the public one) is a
very big and often underestimated part of this overall system of class rule.
Also unduly neglected is the role that elite neoliberal and
corporate-financial-networked policy planning bodies play in staffing,
socializing, solidifying and doctrinally schooling top U.S. executive branch
personnel. The key institutions here are the CFR, The Trilateral Commission,
the Bilderberg Group, the Rand Corp., The Aspen Institute, the Atlantic
Council, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, the Peterson Institute for International Economics,
the Hoover Institution, the Carnegie Corporation of New York/Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Foreign
Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development and The Bretton
Woods Committee.
These core policy organizations (with the CFR in the lead) share three basic
properties: a strong commitment to the domestic and global Open Door
expansion (non-territorial but not without considerable reliance on the U.S.
and U.S.-sponsored military force) of American transnational free market
capitalism (corporate, state and financial); principal funding by
transnationally oriented Fortune 500 corporations and financial
institutions; the ubiquitous presence of their top personnel both in the
elite private (corporate, financial and legal) sector and in White House
GSM positions.
Of Obamas 30 GSMs, van Apeldoorn and de Graaff find, fully 25 (83 percent)
held prior top affiliations with one or more of these planning groups,
totaling 162 such affiliations. The elite policy groups presence was
slightly higher in the Clinton White House (26/209) and similar in the Bush
presidency (22/211).
Another part of the not-so-popular profile for those who become GSMs,
supposedly planning domestic and foreign policy on behalf of we the people
in the U.S. presidency, is training at one or more of the nations and
worlds elite ruling-class universities, where neoliberal ideology and
values prevail. Twenty-five of Obamas (himself Harvard Law-pedigreed) first
38 Cabinet and top advisory
picks(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3853469/Barack-Obama-
taps-into-the-Ivy-League-revolution-with-his-cabinet.html) had a degree
from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago,
Oxford or Cambridge.
Lady Klynton Kissinger Sachs
Will things be any different in the likely Clinton 45 White House? One would
have to be very naive to think so. Its not for nothing that Hillary Clinton
is known on Wall
Street(http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/16/it-takes-hillary-clinton-to-le
ad-a-global-pillage/) as Lady Klynton Kissinger Sachs. The consistently
war-hawkish Clinton is the quintessential power-elite and ruling-class
insider. She was minted and socialized at such ruling-class institutions as
Oxford, Yale Law, Rose Law, the Wal-Mart board of directors, the Democratic
Leadership Council (dedicated to pushing the Democratic Party further to the
corporate-friendly right during the 1980s and 1990s), the White House (eight
years as a highly policy-empowered first lady), the globalist Clinton
Foundation, the CFR and the U.S. State Department. She and her husband
operate in
a world awash in money and connections
[a] very privileged
place, as The New York Times Carolyn Ryan recently
said(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/will-questions-conflict-interest-hurt-cl
inton-campaign/) . She is the candidate of campaign finance and of
(exorbitant) speaking-fee choice for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the CFR, the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Robert Rubin and the rest of the nations
transnationally oriented corporate and financial aristocracyincluding a
remarkable number of pinstripe Republicans who do not trust the unhinged
Trump. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd cleverly
reflects(http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/maureen_dowd_on_hillary
_clinton_20160814) :
All these woebegone Republicans whining that they cant rally behind their
flawed candidate is crazy. The G.O.P. angst, the gnashing and wailing and
searching for last-minute substitutes and exit strategies, is getting old.
They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office,
someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by
corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up.
The
Republicans have their candidate: Its Hillary.
Personnel Is Policy
But its not just about Hillary Clinton. It takes a ruling-class village to
make policy for the few in the name of the many. Clintons vice presidential
pick, Tim Kaine, is a financial-sector darling who backed fast-tracking the
arch-global corporatist, Wall Street-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Her campaign manager, John Podesta, is a legendary ruling-class
inside-outsider. A former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, Podesta
has headed a major Washington, D.C., lobbying firm whose clients have
included BP, Citigroup, Wal-Mart and Lockheed Martin. He founded the Center
for American Progress (CAP), which has become a virtual policy arm of the
neoliberal Obama White House andas The New York Times
reported(http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/us/politics/new-obama-adviser-bri
ngs-corporate-ties.html?_r=0 ) after Obama appointed him as a special
adviser in December of 2013taken millions of dollars in corporate
donations and has its own team of lobbyists who have pushed an agenda that
sometimes echoes the interests of those corporate supporters. The CAP poses
as a progressive, even left-leaning alternative to right-wing think
tanks like the Heritage Foundation, but it really embodies a kind of
reconstructed Third Way neoliberalism that is deeply captive to global
corporate and financial interests. Podesta is also
president(https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/updates/2016/08/16/clinton
-kaine-transition-project-announces-senior-leadership-team/) of the
Clinton-Kaine Transition Project.
Clintons presidential transition team is what the liberal-left political
commentator and activist Norman
Solomon(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/clintons-transition-tea
m_b_11648470.html ) calls a corporate presidency foretold. Besides
Podesta, the teams chair is Salazar, a former U.S. senator who strongly
supports the highly unpopular TPP and angered environmentalists and cheered
Big Carbon by backing offshore drilling and fracking during his years as
Obamas secretary of the Interior. Hes a partner at WilmerHale, one of the
worlds most politically powerful law firms, representing multinational
capital at home and abroadmaking him another example of the revolving-door
phenomenon.
Also on Clintons transition leadership team is Donilon, a member of the
Bilderberg Groups steering committee. After serving as Obamas national
security adviser from late 2010 through the spring of 2013, he became a
distinguished fellow at the CFR and resumed his prior longstanding position
as a partner in the leading multinational corporate law firm OMelveny &
Myers(https://www.omm.com/) .
Other senior Clinton transition officials are longstanding, Democratic
Leadership Council-style operatives Neera
Tanden(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neera_Tanden ;) (a Yale Law graduate
and president of the CAP), Maggie Williams (partner in a leading Washington,
D.C., management consulting firm and former director of a top mortgage
lending firm that collapsed in late 2007) and Harvard Law graduate Jennifer
Granholm (whose pro-Big Business record as a two-term Michigan governor
helped score her lucrative positions on the boards
(http://www.mlive.com/midland/index.ssf/2011/03/ex-politician_payback_granho
lm_isnt_michigans_only_past_governor_serving_on_a_corporate_board.html ) of
Universal Forest Products Inc. and Dow Chemical).
According to William K.
Black(http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31
&Itemid=74&jumival=17041) , who has held top federal regulatory positions,
what we are seeing in this group is complete domination by what used to be
the Democratic Leadership Council.
Very, very right-wing foreign policy.
What they call a muscular foreign policy
a euphemism for invading places.
Very, very tough on crime
[and pro-] mass incarceration. And the economic
side, all in favour of austerity. All in favour of privatization. Tried to
do a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security. And of course,
were all in favour of things like NAFTA.
Its no small matter. The transition team, Black notes, is the one that
is both deciding what are we actually going to make our policy priorities in
the magicagain a clichéfirst 100 days? But more than that, who will the
top people be?
Theres something of a false dichotomy in Blacks knowledgeable reflections.
A longstanding and accurate Washington maxim reminds us that personnel is
policy.
And theres a translation for what Black calls our policy priorities. The
real meaning is their policy priorities, with they referring
to(https://www.amazon.com/They-Rule-1-vs-Democracy/dp/1612053270) the 0.1
percent.
Its Just Politics
What about Clintons widely advertised, Bernie Sanders-influenced shift to
the left during the recent primary campaign? A
report(http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/hillary-clintons-wall-street-ba
ckers-we-get-it-117017 ) published last year in the widely read insider
Washington journal Politico was titled Hillarys Wall Street Backers: We
Get It. As Politico explained, Populist rhetoric, many say, is good
politicsbut doesnt portend an assault on the rich.
Its just politics,
said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street. A Democrat at a top Wall
Street firm told Politico that Clintons outwardly populist rhetoric was a
Rorschach test for how politically sophisticated [rich] people are.
If
someone is upset by this its because they have no idea how populist the
mood of the country still is.
Hillarys Wall Street bankrollers have always known populace-pleasing,
egalitarian-sounding rhetoric is just part of the game. It goes with the
populism-manipulating(http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/10/a-debasing-spec
tacle-behind-and-beyond-the-latest-quadrennial-carnival/ ) territory that
lies at the longstanding, dark heart of American capitalist democracy.
They reasonably
expect(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/28/hillary-clinton
-donald-trump-voters-republicans-democrats ) a President Hillary Clinton to
drop her current, nominal opposition to the TPP as soon as possible.
The People Who Own the Country
Its common to see all of this as discontinuous with, and even as a betrayal
of, the U.S. founders. Its a comforting but historically gullible
sentiment. While Clinton is correct that the nations founding elites
rejected monarchy, she failed to note that they led a national independence
movement and wrote a Constitution to create a militantly undemocratic
property-owners (including slave owners) republic founded on the belief
thatin the words of leading constitutional framer John Jaythe people who
own the country ought to govern it(http://www.bartleby.com/73/764.html) .
The New England clergyman Jeremy Belknap captured the fundamental idea
behind the founders curious notion of what they liked to call popular
government. Let it stand as a principle, Belknap
wrote(https://www.amazon.com/American-Political-Tradition-Men-Made/dp/067972
3153) to an associate, that government originates from the people, but let
the people be taught
that they are unable to govern themselves.
There is a difference, however, one that actually reflects better on the
aristo-republican founders than on todays corporate and financial ruling
class. Prior to the onset of the neoliberal era in the 1970s, Noam Chomsky
has
noted(http://www.alternet.org/story/152933/noam_chomsky_speaks_to_occupy%3A_
if_we_want_a_chance_at_a_decent_future,_the_movement_here_and_around_the_wor
ld_must_grow ) , the United States had been, with ups and downs
a
developing society, not always in pretty ways [quite an understatementsee
this at once brilliant and horrifying history of U.S. cotton
slavery(https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/046500296X) ],
but with general progress toward industrialization, prosperity and expansion
of rights. Since the triumph of finance capital, however, its been about
de-development
a significant shift of the economy from productive
enterpriseproducing things people need or could useto financial
manipulation. Its also been about obliterating decent American jobs
through technical displacement and capital and jobs export and the ruination
of livable ecologythe cancellation of a decent future and the economy and
society where all our children can dream, and those dreams are within
reach.
The only reason that a dangerous, white-nationalist, uber-narcissist and
Breitbart-wielding hatemonger like Donald Trumpwith his bombastic promise
to make America great again partly by restoring lost U.S. industrial
supremacyis even still in shouting distance of Clinton is that millions of
working- and middle-class Americans know in their bones that she is part of
that great dark cancellation, foreclosure and enclosure.
Football Player Colin Kaepernick Wont Stand for the National Anthem Until
This Country Changes
As France Lifts Municipal Burkini Ban, Lets Ask Why We Should Care What
Other People Wear?
Is This Is Election Going to Be a Landslide?
It Takes a Ruling-Class Village to Staff the White House
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